All the talk and videos about processing, you never mentioned...

[EggGardener]

I dry plucked all the dirty feathers before scalding. I think it helped with the smell.

 

[booker81]

If we're comparing stinky stories, I have to bring mine

I used to work in a food safety lab, and we would test the detection kits by growing various bacteria in broth culture and then test it. Sometimes, we got adventurous and would actually either straight test food from the store, or go nuts and inoculate food and grow bacteria and test it.

I don't remember why it was done now, but we inoculated about 20lbs of shrimp with Salmonella or something. It then was placed in the broth in about 50 bags, and allowed to incubate at ideal bacterial growth temp for I think two days. By then, it was pretty much VERY rotten shrimp in some extraordinarily nasty broth.

It reeked, but the best was to come. To dispose, we had to autoclave it to kill the bacteria, and well, take about 50lbs of extremely rotten shrimp "soup" and put it in a pressure cooker.

What came out of the autoclave when it was done was a steam cloud of absolute epic nasty. The whole lab was gagging, and then in our rush to get out of the room, the stench spread through the whole building. People two floors up were complaining. A few people did throw up.

I hope I never have to smell anything like that again. We never did an experiment like that again with shrimp of that proportion.

 

[TomG]

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I think you should pass on "take your daughter to work day".

 

[FeedYourself]

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You should ask Dirty Jobs to come for a visit. Nice work.

 

[NonnasBabies]

I have a very keen sense of smell and even though it wasn't a good smell it wasn't horrible. I always use gloves! And for plucking, we made one like this https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=434288 it worked great!! We processed 7 today and it's the first time we plucked. We normally just skin them!!

 

[FeedYourself]

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[galanie]

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